Forget all those artsy-fartsy anthology films – Paris, je t’aime and the like. Sure,
they gave Juliette Binoche something to do before she made Dan in Real Life, but nobody has ever taken these segments of
shorts to their full potential. What the anthology film needs is some balls.

Movie 43 has
balls. On Hugh Jackman’s neck. Yep, Movie
43 opens with a blind date from hell as Kate Winslet sets off for dinner
with the most eligible man in New York (Jackman), only to see a bit too much
for a first date. It’s an outrageously silly premise, balls on one’s neck, but
Winslet and Jackman sell it surprisingly well by making a curious departure from
their typical roles and playing it straight. Winslet has a real knack for
physical comedy and Jackman, well, has a lot of balls for taking this part.
(One can see why Tom Hooper shot him from the chin-up in Les Misérables.)

Movie 43 continues
with a disgusting, but mildly hilarious, sketch featuring real life husband and wife
Live Schreiber and Naomi Watts as parents who explain their philosophy on
homeschooling. The adolescent years of their son’s life, they believe, should
be a boy’s most awkward, painful years even if his only peers are his parents.
From hazing to the first kiss, the parents give their son Kevin the full high
school experience. “We need to talk about Kevin,” the neighbours might say, but
any homeschool rampage would be good karma for these parents.

The novelty of the film is seeing some sophisticated stars
do material that seems utterly beneath them. Take, for example, Halle Berry
smearing her breast with guacamole. The whole set up of the film, however, is
based on the idea that such A-listers would never star in a movie like Movie 43. “Kate Winslet would never do
this movie,” tells a producer (Greg Kinnear) to a screenwriter (Dennis Quaid)
who pitches each scene as a movie idea. (The pitch starts with the screenwriter
promising a heartwarming commercial film that’s a lot like The Help.) As Winslet watches Jackman dribble soup onto neck
scrotum, however, these stars prove that they can sit back and relax.

After kicking itself in the nuts with some raunchy balls and
incest jokes, Movie 43 ups the ante
as it offers more straight-laced stars performing outrageous jokes and
sketches. It’s some of the grossest, goofiest, nastiest shit you’ll see in a
movie. It’s like watching a bunch of stars and filmmakers play “the penis game”
in short film form.

The sketches with Winslet and Watts might shout the loudest,
though, and the novelty of the celebrity penis game peters off rather quickly.
Thanks to the first two sketches, Movie
43 offers some of the biggest laughs I’ve had in a while. However, the film
stops being funny after thirty minutes—right around the time that moviegoers
can no longer exit the theatre and ask for their money back—and begins to show
its desperation and juvenile charade. Movie
43 pushes the envelope in every sketch and offers some of the wildest stuff
yet to be seen in a movie, but there is a reason that few comics have gone to
such a limit. Some of this stuff just isn’t funny.

The fatal flaw of Movie
43, besides all the flat jokes about poop and periods, is the thin thread
that holds all the sketches together. Not one second works in the embedded
narrative works, aside from pointing out what a good sport Kate Winslet’s
being, so Movie 43 repeatedly cuts
back to dead air after winning a few nasty chuckles. Movie 43, however, should be winning endless ripples of belly laughs
for a film with so much star power.

It’s obvious that all the performers in Movie 43 are having an absolute riot, but there’s no reason that
making a film should be more fun than watching it. A pie in the face will
always be funny if it’s thrown with good timing. It doesn’t necessarily make
the joke any funnier if the pie is filled with flaming hot poop.